


Both Sides of the Coin

by Luck_O_Tucker



Series: The Bonds Between Us [11]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23291974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luck_O_Tucker/pseuds/Luck_O_Tucker
Summary: Trip had one question: "How long..." but the answer was not what he'd been expecting.
Series: The Bonds Between Us [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1642147
Kudos: 15





	Both Sides of the Coin

**Author's Note:**

> This story was, at one time, part of a chapter in a longer one "The Double Edge", which was my first attempt at writing an action/ espionage/ mystery story, though with a different twist as it led to future events. Unfortunately, though I know how that story is SUPPOSED to come out, I have wet-painted myself into a corner with it. No, I haven't scrapped it. There is always the hope the wet paint will dry and I can get back across the room and finish it. (Eternal optimist... or, maybe I just hate the though of eliminating so many filled pages!) Anyway, I always liked the potential dynamic between Phlox and Trip. Always wished in the series they had had more opportunities to interact.

Both Sides or the Coin

29 January 2055

“How long do you expect this to take, Doc?”   
From where he sat on one of Sickbay’s diagnostic tables, Trip watched the lights from the wall display behind him reflecting off Phlox’s forehead.  
“Only another few seconds, Mister Tucker.” Keying in several quick commands, the doctor studied his data PADD. His eyebrows rose in inquiry, then narrowed in concentration. Those weren’t the expressions Trip was hoping for.  
He listened to the tap, tap, tap of Phlox’s quick fingers conversing with the PADD, then watched him raise his gaze from its small screen to look past him at the wall. The rapid shift of colors washing over his face announced that the screen was coming alive with the flickering and flashing patterns of diagnostic information.   
As Phlox set the scanner on a nearby table without taking his eyes from the wall display, Trip swallowed a rising fist of impatience and unease. What was the doc staring at up there this time?   
Well, no point turning around for a look of his own. That screen’s images would make about as much sense to him as Klingon opera.   
Instead, he watched Phlox’s eyes.  
“Only another few seconds,” the doc had said. Kind of long seconds, weren’t they?   
Of course, maybe that was good. Maybe this time he’d get some solid answers.   
It was hard waiting, harder to keep the impatience out of his voice. “You know that’s not what I meant. What I want to know is how long-?”  
“I know what you meant, Commander.” Phlox’s gaze flicked toward him, then returned to the screen. “I’ve just finished uploading your latest results and requested a comparison with yesterday’s findings. Now, if you’ll kindly lean forward…”  
Trip didn’t move. “Look, I need more than computer projections. What I need is-”  
“What you need, Commander,”” Phlox interrupted. “Is to lower your head.”  
Frowning, Trip complied. But, damn it, he needed answers! Still, gritting his teeth, he held his peace as Phlox slipped a strap over his head, then guided his arm into the sling he’d been trying to wean himself out of since the day after he came back from his parents’ house. Phlox checked the position of his shoulder, elbow and forearm, then secured a neuro-stim band around his upper bicep. “Better?” he asked.  
Despite his irritation, Trip savored the relief when the drag on his shoulder eased. He nodded. “Yeah, but…”   
“In a moment, Commander,” Phlox said, checking the band’s location. There was a soft hum, then a spreading vibration. It rippled over Trip’s deltoid, then moved deeper, dispersing itself into his pecs, biceps and triceps. It reached down into the tissues where the feel of it was harder to name, except as a vague warmth and tingle.   
Trip restrained a sigh. His tone was firm, consciously overriding both the moment of relief and the last couple days of frustration. “Doc, I need to know how long it’s gonna take to clear up this injury! Look, I know that with all the studying of upgrade specs I’ve gotta do during Enterprise’s refits, I’d mostly be scanning system readouts and coordinating my engineering team right now, anyway. But…”  
“But it’s not the same as hands-on participation?” Phlox’s gaze rose to meet his.  
“No,” Trip shook his head. It wasn’t the same at all. Before now, on those occasions when he’d been restricted to either light or limited duty, there’d been moments of exasperation, yeah, and impatience, absolutely! But then, those times had usually been tolerable, even satisfying, if he could turn them into an opportunity to train some up-and-coming new member of the engineering department.   
Not now. This time, he was struggling to find it even marginally tolerable, let alone anything near to satisfying.   
“Supervising lacks the immediacy and immersion you’re looking for?” asked Phlox.   
“Yeah.” Almost against his will, Trip found himself bursting out. “There’s too much damn lag time! Too much time just standing around with nothing to do but wait to check on someone else’s results. I keep thinking about…”   
His words trailed off. He shrugged his uninjured shoulder.  
Phlox’s voice lost its earlier brisk tone. “About Elizabeth?”   
“Yeah. About Elizabeth.”   
Not all that surprising Phlox would hone right in on that, was it? Not only because the doc had known him for several years now, but more, Phlox was, himself a father, right? It wasn’t really a question, not even a silent one. More like drawing on a realization that created an entirely new kind of bond between the two of them.   
Knowing that was kinda comforting, even though Phlox’s kids were all grown up now. Somehow, that made talking to him about Elizabeth different, easier in a way, than speaking of her with Malcolm or Travis. Easier even than with the cap’n, though Jonathan Archer was his best and oldest friend.   
Nonetheless, it took several moments for him to search out his next words. “I keep thinking how there were so many things T’Pol and I never got the chance to do with her that parents dream of. Hell, I never got to do more than let Elizabeth hold my finger through the glove-insert in the side of the incubator that, in the end, never did a thing to help her stay alive!”  
He remembered the amazingly firm pressure that accompanied the instinctive curling of those small, soft fingers, the warmth of them, even through the thin protective membrane that kept Elizabeth’s oxygen-enriched air supply sterile. The memory ached somewhere deep below his breastbone, but to ever imagine it fading with time was an even worse hurt. One almost as bad as the moment when those sweet, perfect fingers loosened their grip and began to grow cool.  
“After the memorial,” Trip went on. “I knew I’d miss her. But it eats me up that, between this shoulder injury and that awful little sterile box she was in, I never got to do what T’Pol did. I never carried her in my arms, or rocked her against my heart until she fell asleep. I think maybe I might be mostly past the tears now, but it still slams me in the guts when I find myself picturing what she would’ve been like at five or ten years old, as a teenager or even as a grown woman, maybe with kids of her own. I wonder how T’Pol would’ve been as her mom, and what kind of Dad I’d’ve been. I think of all the things we’d do together, then I realize none of it’s ever gonna happen.”  
When Phlox’s words came, they were slow, thoughtful. “No matter how we try to avoid the pain of it, Commander, sooner or later, grief demands its rightful time and attention. It’s the only gift that remains for you to honor your little girl with.”  
Trip nodded. “You’d think I’d know that, wouldn’t you? About grief? After all the people we lost in the Expanse? After my sister, Lizzie? I spent months back then, after the Xindi attack, half off my head with grief. I expected that, after how Paxton stole T’Pol’s and my DNA to create our Elizabeth, how he used her as a way to create hate and fear, I’d feel that same kind of rage. But, angry as I am with him and all his damn xenophobe bigots, that’s not the thing that keeps hitting me.”  
Wordless, Phlox raised his eyebrows, a silent invitation to go on.  
Trip drew an uneven breath. “It’s finding some of those old drawings from my nephew’s class in a drawer in my quarters, the kind she’ll never get to make. Or seeing a stuffed toy in a gift shop that I can never bring home for her…”  
“I think-” When he spoke, Phlox’s voice held its own note of sadness. “The hardest lesson we have to learn, over and over again about grief, is that it never looks like we expect it’s going to. That, like joy, it can sneak up to take us by surprise at the least expected moment.”  
“Yeah, you got that one right.” Trip found himself quirking the smallest ghost of a smile at Phlox, as something eased, just a little inside him.   
Sickbay was quiet except for the murmuring of Phlox’s equipment as it analyzed Trip’s readings. The companionable interlude was interrupted by a low, drawn-out tone as Phlox’s diagnostic equipment announced the comparative analysis was complete. “All right,” the doctor raised his eyes to the readout screen. “Let’s see what we have here.”  
Trip shifted his position for a brief look. Yeah, just the expected bright tangle of colors, visual Klingon opera. “Well, Doc, what do you think?”  
Phlox studied the PADD, then tap, tap, tapped on it. Again, there was a brief humming sound, then another wave of vibration rippled through Trip’s shoulder before defusing through the tissues.   
“I’ve been able to reduce the intensity of the neuro-stim setting for the third straight day now” Phlox announced, gesturing to the small device circling Trip’s bicep.   
“That’s good, right?” Trip watched his face for some concrete information.   
“You should start noticing the strength coming back more rapidly now.” Another few taps on the PADD and the reflected colors from the wall display that had been kaleidoscoping across Phlox’s face vanished. “We’ll start supplementing your passive range of motion exercises with some active ones starting this afternoon, and…”  
Active! He liked the sound of that. At least that was progress. But it still didn’t tell him what he’d wanted, needed to know when he came in here. How long until-?   
“…then,” Phlox continued, steadying Trip down from the table, before turning to cross Sickbay to return the PADD to its accustomed place. “In a day or so, we’ll begin adding in some weight and resistance.”   
Trip stared after him as he passed the corner where Elizabeth’s incubator had been, only days ago. Would he always see its afterimage if he looked at that particular spot? Experience the helpless rage and futility the very sight of the thing had knotted in his guts? Relive the aching sorrow and sense of separation that he and T’Pol had shared as they gazed at their daughter beyond the wall of glass?   
At least he’d been almost- almost- able to touch her. Able, anyway, to feel the pressure from the encircling grip of that small hand on his finger. Had she shared something of T’Pol’s Vulcan telepathy, he’d wondered, gazing into her wide blue eyes? Did she sense herself within the bond that made them all a part of each other? And how much she was loved?   
A smile cut its way through the tangling knot of his emotions as he was warmed all over again by the memory of the awe that had swept over him as he met Elizabeth’s wide and wondering gaze. When he saw the beauty in her small face- the chin that reminded him a bit of his mama’s, the Tucker-blue of her eyes, the delicate line of T’Pol’s arching brows and the exquisite curve of her ears. How he had been filled with a tenderness and humility he had never experienced before.   
He hardly realized he was still smiling, or that he was speaking aloud. “Y’know, a month ago, I had no idea she was alive but, then, somehow? All it took was one look and… Well, there she was, like she’d always been there.” His hand rose, gesturing almost unconsciously toward his chest as he continued. “And I knew I’d bring her the moon and the stars if I could…”  
Phlox half turned from his supply cupboard, the PADD still in his hand. A fond smile lifted the corners of his mouth a little, as he nodded.  
“I guess you’d know something about that, wouldn’t you, Doc?” Still caught up in the shining sweet memory, Trip shared the smile. “A whole lot about it? Being a dad five times over and all?”   
Not taking his gaze from Trip’s, Phlox slipped the PADD into its place in the cupboard, then let the door slide shut on it with a soft click. “I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take, Commander.” A touch of that fond, reminiscent smile still lit his face, though his tone grew gentle. “Or that you won’t feel the pain of it at those unexpected times, but… you are healing.”  
“But, Doc-” Trip began in sudden confusion. Phlox had just said he’d be noticing some real improvement now, hadn’t he? But, still, he couldn’t tell him how long-?  
It took a moment to realize that wasn’t what Phlox was talking about. It wasn’t the shoulder injury, but the deeper one to his heart. The one that was at the root of his deepest frustration and impatience. “But, Doc…” he began,   
“No matter how we try to avoid the pain of it, Commander, grief demands its rightful time and attention,” Phlox had said. “It’s the only gift that remains for you to honor your little girl with…”  
Trip’s eyes widened, brows raising to ask their own silent question, though he already knew the answer to it. Like him, Phlox had experienced both sides of the fatherhood coin. No wonder Phlox could speak of grief as a gift. No wonder he could recognize, maybe even before Trip himself had done so, that, in the moment he smiled, reliving the awe and the love he’d experienced in his daughter’s presence, that he was, indeed, healing. And that joy, like grief, could sneak up to surprise at the least expected moment. Like this one, when they had shared their memories with someone who could stand with them in wordless understanding.  
Trip drew a deep breath. “You… You’ve been here, too, Doc, haven’t you?”  
He hoped Phlox would find having someone else around who understood both the joys and griefs as comforting as he did, even if they never happened to talk about them again.  
That small smile still on his face, Phlox was nodding his confirmation. His warm gaze was lit with something like gratitude. “You’re right, Commander. At one time, there were six.”


End file.
